We don’t talk enough about the damage religion does to Nigeria.
Let me be precise about what I mean, because this is the part where people usually stop reading and start defending.
I am not talking about faith. I am not talking about people who pray, or fast, or find comfort and meaning in worship. I am not talking about the churches and mosques that feed people, that educate people, that hold communities together when the government does not.
I am talking about a specific kind of religion. The kind that destroys critical thinking. The kind that creates a population that is easy to manipulate. The kind that trains people to hand their own judgement over to invisible authorities — and then to human authorities who claim to speak for them.
Over generations, we have produced a tsunami of young Nigerians who were never taught to question.
They were taught to obey. They were taught what to believe long before they were old enough to understand why. They were taught to fear God, fear hell, fear demons, fear spiritual attack, fear witches, fear curses, fear their own mother-in-law. And then we act surprised when they grow into adults who can be controlled by anybody who understands how to press those buttons.We have seen exactly what that looks like.
When MMM collapsed in Nigeria in 2016, millions of people lost their money in a scheme that promised thirty percent a month. It did not spread through economics. It spread through trust networks — church groups, prayer partners, fellowship WhatsApp groups, the sister who “testified” that God had used MMM to pay her rent. People who would have haggled for twenty minutes over the price of tomatoes handed over their life savings because the invitation came wrapped in the language of blessing.
That is not a story about greed. It is a story about what happens to a population that has been trained to accept claims without evidence, so long as the claim arrives in a sacred package.
But this article is about something narrower, and closer to home.
The observation that disturbs me
I have repeatedly noticed how many Nigerian women appear disconnected from the intellectual conversations happening all around them.
- Talk about geopolitics.
- Talk about Western influence.
- Talk about colonialism.
- Talk about race and how it was constructed.
- Talk about how global power actually operates.
- Talk about the economic interests sitting behind institutions.
- Talk about what religious institutions do with money and influence.
- Talk about how fear is weaponised to control populations.
- Talk about anything that requires stepping outside the worldview you inherited.
And very often, the conversation simply dies.
And when religion enters the room, something even more striking happens. You can challenge an idea with facts. You can point out a contradiction. You can ask a reasonable question. You can bring historical evidence.
And instead of engagement, you get:
- “Have faith.”
- “God knows best.”
- “Don’t question God.”
- “You just don’t believe.”
- “May God forgive you.”
- “You will understand when you grow spiritually.”
The conversation is over.
Not because the argument was defeated. Because the belief has been moved somewhere the argument cannot reach.
That is the problem.
Before I go further: this is not a defect of women
I want to be honest about something, because if I skip it, this article becomes just another man lecturing women about their minds. There is nothing about being a Nigerian woman that makes a person less capable of reasoning. Nothing. The pattern I am describing is not natural. It was manufactured, deliberately and over a long time, and we know exactly how.
Ask who was pulled out of school first when the money finished. Ask who was told that too much education would make her “unmarriageable.” Ask who was married off before her mind had finished forming. Ask who is economically dependent on a husband, a church, a family, and therefore cannot afford to be seen doubting any of them. Ask who gets blamed when a child dies, when a pregnancy fails, when a business collapses — and who is therefore most desperate for a spiritual explanation that transfers the blame somewhere else.
Ask who is punished socially for saying “I don’t think that’s true.”
A man who becomes an atheist in Nigeria is called controversial. A woman who does the same is called a wayward woman, a bad wife, a danger to her children. The cost is not the same. It has never been the same.
So no — this is not about women’s capacity. It is about a system that made doubt expensive for women and cheap for men, and then congratulated the men for being thinkers. I say all this because I want to be clear about who I am blaming. Not you. The machine that shaped you. But I am still going to ask you to break it. Because you are the only one standing where it can be broken.
Religion as an intellectual firewall
Here is what fascinates me most.
A person can be brilliant in one area of life and completely suspend critical thinking the moment religion enters the room.
She can price goods better than any economist.
She can negotiate a supplier down to the last naira.
She can run three businesses out of one shop.
She can read a person’s intentions in thirty seconds.
She can navigate social dynamics more complex than most corporate politics.
But introduce a religious claim and the standard of evidence collapses to zero.
Everything that would normally require proof is accepted because somebody said, “God said so.”
And if you question it, the burden mysteriously shifts to you — you must now prove that God did not say so.
This is not faith. Faith is a person saying, “I believe this, and I know I cannot prove it.”
This is something else. This is intellectual surrender dressed in Sunday clothes.
And notice who benefits.
The firewall does not protect God. God does not need protecting. The firewall protects the man collecting the offering. It protects the prophet who prophesied wrongly and cannot be asked about it. It protects the pastor who tells a woman that her cancer is a spiritual attack and that surgery would mean doubting her healing. It protects the politician who arrives with a bag of rice and a prayer request three weeks before an election.
The firewall was not built to keep doubt out. It was built to keep questions away from the people who cannot survive them.
Why I am addressing women specifically
There is one reason, and it is not complicated.
You are raising the next generation. Honestly, an adult who wants to spend her entire life believing exactly what she was taught is entitled to that. It is her mind and her life. The bigger problem is what happens next. She raises children. And she hands them the same fear. The child is born curious. This is not a Nigerian trait or a Western trait. It is a human trait. Every child arrives asking:
- Why?
- Why does this happen?
- Why shouldn’t I do this?
- Why should I believe this?
- What happens if I don’t?
- How do we know?
And instead of that curiosity being fed, it is very often met with fear.
- “God will punish you.”
- “You will go to hell.”
- “Don’t question God.”
- “The devil will get you.”
- “Don’t associate with those people.”
- “Don’t read that.”
- “Don’t ask too many questions.”
- “Just believe.”
And slowly, something happens.
The child stops asking. The child learns that some questions are dangerous. The child learns that some authorities cannot be challenged. The child learns that fear is an acceptable substitute for understanding. The child grows up. The child has children. The child does exactly the same thing.
That is the cycle. It does not run on doctrine. It runs on a mother’s voice, in a small room, answering a small question badly — a thousand times, across a lifetime, across a country.
What this costs, in real lives
I want to move this out of the abstract, because it is not abstract at all.
In Akwa Ibom and Cross River, over the last two decades, thousands of children have been branded witches — accused, beaten, abandoned, some of them killed — after being “identified” by preachers and deliverance ministries. The trigger is usually ordinary: a child who is sickly, or stubborn, or unusually clever, or simply unlucky enough to be present when a family’s fortunes turned. Local NGOs have taken in hundreds of these children. Nigerian journalists and film-makers have documented it repeatedly. It is still happening.
Ask yourself what has to be true inside a parent’s mind before they can hand their own child over to that.
They have to believe that misfortune must have a spiritual author. They have to believe that a man in a pulpit can identify that author. They have to believe that this identification cannot be questioned.
Every single one of those beliefs was installed at home, in childhood, by someone who loved them.
Then there is the quieter version, which kills far more people and never makes the news. The woman who stops taking her hypertension medication because she “claimed her healing.” The parents who keep a child at a prayer house for six weeks while a treatable illness becomes untreatable.
The family who spends a year and two million naira on deliverance sessions for a mental health condition that had a name and a treatment protocol the whole time.
The girl who is told her seizures are a spiritual attack rather than epilepsy, and grows up believing she is possessed. The young man who does not study, because he has been told that God will “do it” and then, when he fails, is told that an enemy did it.
That last one deserves special attention, because it is everywhere. We have raised a generation that believes preparation is optional and prayer is a strategy. Then we wonder why our institutions do not work. An institution is just a large number of people doing unglamorous work carefully. A country that has been trained to expect miracles instead of process will never build one.
Nigerian men are absolutely part of this
Let me not pretend Nigerian men are somehow immune.
Plenty of Nigerian men are deeply religious, deeply superstitious, and completely incapable of examining their own beliefs. Many of them were raised by women who handed them those beliefs and by fathers who did not care enough to check.
But there is a difference I keep encountering, and I think it is worth naming honestly rather than pretending it is not there.
You will find a significant number of Nigerian men who eventually questioned the framework they were raised in. Men who stepped outside it. Men who got interested in science, philosophy, history, economics, technology, the mechanics of power. Men who looked at something they were taught at six years old and said:
“Wait. Is this actually true?”
I want to say clearly why that gap exists, because it is not a compliment to men.
It exists because men were given the room. Men were educated longer. Men were allowed to travel, to argue in public, to be difficult, to be wrong loudly and recover from it. Men could question the pastor and still be respected on the street. A man’s doubt is treated as intellect. A woman’s doubt is treated as rebellion.
So when I say I want more of that questioning among Nigerian women, I am not asking women to become more like men.
I am saying the room was stolen, and I want it back.
And this is where fathers have to stop being spectators
A lot of Nigerian men have quietly outsourced the raising of their children. They provide money. They pay school fees. They go to work. They come home.
They assume that because the children are fed, clothed and enrolled somewhere, the job is done.
No.
You are also responsible for what goes into your child’s mind. You need to know what your children are being taught. You need to know what fears are being installed in them. You need to know what they are being told about the world, about danger, about other people, about themselves.
Because if you leave the intellectual formation of your child entirely to somebody else, you have no right to be surprised when your child grows up with somebody else’s worldview.
You cannot complain about the next generation while being absent from the process that produces it. If you know your children are being raised on irrational fear, intervene.
If you know they are being taught that questioning is sin, intervene. If you know they are being taught that every bad thing is caused by witches, demons, or a jealous aunty, intervene.
If you know they are being trained to accept assertions without evidence, intervene.
And intervene properly. Not by mocking their mother in front of them. Not by turning the child into a battlefield. By sitting with your child, taking the question seriously, and showing them what an honest answer looks like.
Your job is not only to protect your children physically. You also have to protect their ability to think.
Questioning authority is not foreign to Nigerian women. It is your inheritance.
I want to say something to any woman reading this who feels attacked.
The tradition I am asking you to reclaim is not a Western import. It is yours. It is older than the churches that told you to be quiet.
In 1929, in Aba and across the south-east, women organised one of the largest anti-colonial uprisings in Nigerian history, because they examined a taxation system, understood exactly whose interests it served, and refused it. They were not educated in the way we mean today. They were not “exposed.” They simply asked who benefits, and acted.
In the 1940s, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti built the Abeokuta Women’s Union out of market women and taught them literacy alongside politics. They challenged a tax regime and a traditional authority and the Alake of Egbaland was forced from his throne. She did that in wrapper and buba, as a mother, in a society that told her to sit down.
Dora Akunyili took on counterfeit drug syndicates at NAFDAC when doing so meant assassination attempts and her office being burned. She was operating on a very simple principle: a claim on a label must be tested, and evidence beats assertion. That is the exact habit of mind I am arguing for.
These women did not question because they hated their culture. They questioned because they loved the people who were being harmed by it.
That is the lineage. Not obedience. Not silence. Not “just believe.”
So when somebody tells you that a questioning woman is a corrupted woman, understand that they are the ones who broke with tradition, not you.
What I am actually asking for
- Let me be exact, because vague criticism changes nothing.
- I am not asking you to leave your church.
- I am not asking you to stop praying, stop fasting, stop believing.
- I am not asking you to hand your children to me, or to the internet, or to anybody’s ideology.
- I am asking for five things.
One. Stop raising children primarily through fear. Fear works fast and costs everything. A child who behaves because he is terrified has learned nothing about right and wrong — he has only learned to avoid detection. Give reasons. “Don’t lie, because people who lie eventually cannot be trusted, and a person nobody trusts has a very hard life.” That takes longer. It also survives into adulthood.
Two. Stop treating every unexplained event as spiritual. Sometimes the child is sick because the water was dirty. Sometimes the business failed because the margins were wrong. Sometimes the accident happened because the tyre was bald. Teaching a child to look for a natural explanation first is not godlessness. It is the difference between a child who becomes an engineer and a child who becomes a victim.
Three. Stop making questions synonymous with disrespect. This is the one that matters most. When your child asks a hard question, the answer is not “who taught you that?” The answer is “that is a good question — let us find out.” You are allowed to say I don’t know. Those three words are one of the greatest gifts you can hand a child. They teach him that not knowing is normal, and that finding out is possible.
Four. Stop confusing obedience with morality. An obedient child is not a good child. An obedient child is a controllable child — and he will be just as controllable at thirty, by a pastor, a politician, a boyfriend, or a fraudster. Morality is knowing why an act harms someone. Build that, and you will never need to threaten him with hell.
Five. Stop being afraid of your own children’s questions. Your child asking “how do we know that?” is not the devil. It is your child’s mind working correctly. If your belief is true, it can survive a nine-year-old. If it cannot survive a nine-year-old, you should want to know that.
What to say when your child asks
Because I do not want to leave this at the level of complaint, here is the practical version.
When your child asks something you cannot answer, you have four honest options, and none of them involve fear.
- “I don’t know. Let’s find out together.”
- “Some people believe X, other people believe Y, and here is why each of them thinks so.”
- “That’s what I was taught. I’ve never actually checked. Let’s check.”
- “I believe this, and I want to be honest with you — I can’t prove it. I believe it anyway, and here’s why it matters to me.”
That last one is important. You can be a woman of deep faith and still model intellectual honesty. In fact, that combination is far more powerful than either alone — because your child then learns that belief and honesty are not enemies, and he will not have to choose between them at nineteen and lose you in the process.
The children we lose to cynicism are usually the ones who were told that questioning meant leaving. So they questioned. And then they left.
The children are the real battleground
This is not Nigerian women versus Nigerian men.
It is about what kind of human beings this country is producing.
A child who cannot question is easy to manipulate.
A child trained to fear authority will obey authority any authority, including the ones you would hate.
A child taught that faith outranks evidence will struggle, for the rest of his life, to tell truth from persuasion.
A child who cannot separate evidence from assertion is prey for politicians, for prophets, for influencers, for Ponzi schemes, for propagandists, for anybody who understands human psychology and has decided to profit from it.
Nigeria already has more than enough of that.
We do not need another generation that can be steered simply by being told that God is angry with them.
We need people who can ask:
“How do you know?”
“Where is the evidence?”
“Who benefits from me believing this?”
“What is the alternative explanation?”
“Could I be wrong?”
That is critical thinking.
And critical thinking is one of the most valuable forms of freedom a human being can own. It cannot be seized at a checkpoint, devalued by the CBN, or stolen by a relative. It is the one inheritance that cannot be taken from your child once you have given it.
I genuinely do not care whether you believe in God
Believe. Don’t believe.
Pray. Don’t pray.
Go to church. Don’t go.
That is not my business, and I have no interest in making it my business.
My concern begins at the exact point where a belief is used to shut down the capacity to reason — and where that limitation is then handed to a child who never agreed to it.
Because your child did not choose your worldview.
You gave it to them.
And if you are going to give a child a worldview, at least give them the tools to eventually examine it.
Let them challenge you.
Let them disagree with you.
Let them discover that you were wrong about something.
Let them discover that their teacher was wrong.
Let them discover that their pastor was wrong.
Let them discover that an entire society can be wrong — because ours has been, many times, about many things.
And teach them the sentence almost no Nigerian adult can say out loud:
“I have changed my mind, because I found better evidence.”
That is not weakness. That is not being unserious. That is intelligence, and it is the rarest thing in this country.
To the mothers
I keep returning to you, and I want to explain why, one more time, without insult.
It is not because you are the problem.
It is because you have the power.
You are usually the first teacher. The first authority. The first source of moral instruction. The first voice that tells a child what is good, what is dangerous, what is sacred, and what must never be questioned.
Nobody else in that child’s life will ever have that much influence again.
Whoever holds that position holds the country’s future, and right now that is you. That is not a burden I am inventing to shame you with. It is a fact, and it means you are the one person positioned to end something that has run in your family for four generations.
If your child asks a difficult question and the only answer you have is “God said so,” you have not taught him anything.
You have taught him to stop asking.
And that is precisely how the cycle survives.
Break it in your own house. That is all I am asking. Not a revolution — one honest answer at a time, to one curious child, in one small room.
Nigerian women need to do better.
Nigerian men need to do better, and fathers especially need to stop being spectators in the intellectual upbringing of their own children.
The future of Nigeria is sitting in our homes right now, asking questions.
And we are deciding, every single day, whether it keeps asking.